By giving qubits a 'third state,' we've enabled hardware that can detect and report its own errors.
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
Hardware-Efficient Erasure Qubits With Superconducting Transmon Qutrits
arXiv · 2604.08672
The Takeaway
Using transmon qutrits as 'erasure qubits' allows the system to flag its own failures, extending the effective qubit lifetime by 10x. It shifts error correction from software overhead to a built-in hardware feature.
From the abstract
Quantum error correction using erasure qubits offers higher fault-tolerant thresholds and improved scaling by converting dominant physical errors into detectable erasures. In superconducting circuits, erasure qubits can be constructed using the dual-rail approach, which, however, requires additional qubit-count overhead and tailored coupling elements. Here, we demonstrate a hardware-efficient scheme that operates transmon qutrits as erasure qubits, which is compatible with standard superconducti